Of course, they have been using Goog-411 to improve it, and Google Voice will only accelerate that (on the plus side, I don't need a landline at all anymore with cheap international calls).... but Google's voice search on the iphone is much better than I could ask of it.

If they came out with a voice recognition product, the field currently dominated by the mediocre Dragon Naturally Speaking, I'm sure they could completely kill the competition.

Google Voice speech recognition isn't exactly the best. "Hey, Zack, this is Terrence at [company name here]. Please give me a call as soon as you get the chance to. We need to, uh, we wanted to know if you were going to make it in to day. Thank you." somehow becomes "Hey there, This is Sarah positions. Please give me a call as as soon as you get a chance to. We need to we. What's up for you not be able to make it today. Thank you."

"Imagine using the same display for monitoring server uptime, or RSS feeds!"

I'm trying to imagine it, man, but it's BLOWING MY FREAKIN' MIND.

Wait, I thought this article was about using voice control with the display, not the display itself (which is ancient).

I just managed to get my server to stop calling 900 numbers and start calling my Google Voice. RSS feeds haven't worked so well though. With the server calling and leaving a new voicemail every millisecond, the website can never seem to get through.

Ho-hum. I was doing this crap with a voicemodem, Homeseer, and a BetaBrite display like 10 years ago. It had far less latency, too. I mean kudos for building your own LED grid, I guess, but neither voice recognition nor LED control, nor tying the two together with scripts, it particularly new.

Damn, I thought he'd figured out a direct way to interface with the google voice recognition software. THAT is something I could really use right now. A project that does it through the phone though....not so much.

On a related note, anyone know of any very good and easy to interface with free (open source is very highly preferred, but free beer is ok too) voice recognition software? I'm currently looking at Sphinx-4, but I have absolutely no experience in this area.

I used sphinx recently (pocketsphinx) to implement a voice recognition system for a sailboat, allowing quadriplegic sailors to control the boat. Sphinx is a decent voice recognition system but can't match big time commercial products like Google voice or Dragon naturally speaking. This is especially the case if you want recognition of natural speech (instead of the few code words used in my project).
Have you considered the microsoft speech API (http://www.microsoft.com/speech/speech2007/default.mspx) ?

It's an interesting hack, but I really don't like the commercial feeling the story has, with a link in the slashdot post, an oral mention of the LED kit seller in the video, and a big "Thanks nerdkits" displayed at the end.

Well to be honest, I was expecting a GIANT LED display, like the ones used for outdoor advertising; something in the range of 15x10 feet or something. This one is huge in terms of big LEDs, nothing else.

Imagine setting up scripts like one in the demo for certain commands, like poweroff, hdd wipe, switching on/off heating/lighting, and so on. Now imagine a funny friend learning your trigger word. Now, how cool is that ?:))

The Asterisk crowd has been playing Zork over phone systems for quite some time now... all thats needed to make a computer do anything via voice command is a decent speech to text lib, like sphinx, and a way to get your verbal noises into the computer for it to decipher. Past that its the same old scripting game. Voice recognition is about like the Internet, it was really exciting the first few years when it was new and actually innovative, now doing something via the Internet/via Voice Recognition is noth